In Weber's works, the overriding dynamic of the modern world is
one of increasing rationalizations on all spheres of life. As
bureaucratic organization is not limited to capitalist production,
all facets of life become infused with a bureaucratic, rationalized
system in which actions are systematic and the order is justified by
recourse to legalistic rules rather than personal or traditional ties.
This system was first pioneered by ascetic Protestants who placed
moral value on a life of systematic hard work and who thus had
justification to act in a way that was seen as sinful to the majority
at the time. Their efforts, in conjunction with other factors such as
technology, allowed for the capitalist system to develop, which, in
turn, promoted the ever-increasing bureaucratization of the world
outside of capitalism, including the state and the military. As the
trend of bureaucratization intensifies, the ideological justification
for bureaucratic activity is no longer necessary, because, once the
system is in place, it can compel individuals to act within its terms
without such an ideology. The resulting bureaucracy becomes a
mechanism for pursuing maximum rationalization on an increasingly
large scale. The depersonalization of the system allows for a great
degree of stability and predictability, making it almost impossible
to destroy. Ironically, bureaucracy discourages the individual
participants to pursue rational goals; they are instead tied to the
system and unable to exercise independent power or pursue rational
action. The process of rationalization has many inherent dangers, as
it can create a dearth of meaning and direction for individuals to
guide their lives by, generating stagnation. This problem cannot be
solved through the abolition of class differences, as in Marx, or
through systems of democratic government, as in Tocqueville, since
bureaucratic organization exists outside of the economic sphere would
continue to retain control over democracy and the Socialist state.
The loss of value that is an intrinsic problem of modernity can only
be counteracted through the actions of charismatic individuals who
are able to briefly infuse an irrational sense of meaning in their
followers. However, the nature of charisma determines that its
effects are limited, and it is necessary that such infusions of
charisma continue to occur. The dynamic of rationalization in the
modern world is central to Weber's analysis of modernity, as the
rationalization of all spheres of life is the chief dynamic of modern
Western society.

Modern capitalism that promotes the calculated maximization of the
profit motive came into being through the trailblazing efforts of
ascetic Protestants, who had a religious duty to accumulate and
reinvest capital, an action that was largely condemned at the time.
Because such action "had to fight its way to supremacy against a
whole world of hostile forces" (Protestant Ethic 56), it was
necessary that capitalism be pushed by a group with a strong moral
justification to pursue capitalist activity. The doctrines of
religious asceticism, while not directly promoting capitalism, led
their followers to relentlessly pursue capitalist activity. As the
God of Calvin and other ascetic Protestants was held to be omniscient
and omnipotent, it was necessary that God had known the destinies of
each individual from the beginning and one was unable to influence
this decision. The religious ascetic was faced with a personal and
unknowable God who was unreachable through magic rituals or
intermediaries such as priests. Thus, the believer "was forced
to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for
him for eternity. No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen
one can understand the word of God only in his own heart . . . the
complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the
sacraments . . . was what formed the absolutely decisive difference
from Catholicism" (Protestant Ethic 104-105). This situation
created a great deal of anxiety among ascetic Protestants, who
frantically tried to convince themselves of their own sanctity in the
only means their doctrines left available: the fulfillment of a
calling in the temporal world. "The social activity of the
Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei.
This character is hence shared by labor in a calling which serves the
mundane life of the community" (Protestant Ethic 108). As labor
is considered a sacred duty, the fruits of this labor must be
maximized in order to glorify God as much as possible. In addition,
the individual does not actually possess what is produced; because it
is created to glorify God, it cannot be utilized for individual gain,
but must be used in a way to increase divine glory. These irrational
motivations created the capitalist system, in which economic
production was rationalized and capital was reinvested to produce
maximum gain.

The rationalization of economic activity by ascetic
Protestants was not an isolated event, and had many results,
including the decline of religious or irrational justifications for
rationalized activity and the rationalization of the world outside of
the economic sphere. A significant trend in the development of
capitalism is the disappearance of religious justification for
capitalist activity. The 'spirit' of rational capitalism persists as
it loses its religious backing. Weber demonstrates the lack of
religion in his description of the ethos of Ben Franklin, who
promotes the ideals associated with ascetic Protestantism despite his
Deist beliefs. While capitalism still retains a moral value, it is
alienated from the religious beliefs that initially produced it, and
"the isolated economic man who carries on missionary activities
on the side thakes the place of the lonely spiritual search for the
Kingdom of Heaven" (Protestant Ethic 176). Eventually, even this
sort of justification is unnecessary, as the logic of the capitalist
system forces the individual to rationally maximize and reinvest
profit in order to avoid being 'driven out' by the more competitive
rational capitalists.

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do
so . . . [ascetic Protestantism] did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now
bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production
which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born
into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic
acquisition, with irresistible force" (Protestant Ethic 181-182).

The individual, trapped in the "iron cage" of the
system, ceases all attempts to justify participation in the system
with a set of values, and a morally vacant compulsion takes the place
of a meaningful ethic.

The advent of capitalism also requires and supports an increasing
degree of rationalization and bureaucratization of the outside world,
as the capitalist's rational action requires that rules and laws are
in place and a money economy is necessary for mature bureaucracies to
exist. The increasing degree of predictability that an increasingly
industrialized capitalist economy requires that forms of domination
which entail individual decision-making and interpersonal ties be
eliminated in favor of a bureaucracy, in which domination and the decision-making
process are impersonal, and, as a result, predictable. The state,
army, or technological lab cannot be erratic or make decisions on a
case-by-case basis; rather, it must be counted upon to produce the
anticipated results. This predictability allows for the greater
efficiency that is a requirement of capitalist production. "It
is primarily the capitalist market which demands that the official
business of public administration be discharged precisely,
unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible . . .
buisiness management throughout rests on increasing precision,
steadiness, and, above all, speed of operations" (Bureaucracy
975). This necessitates the existence and predominance of a legally
justified order, in which strict rules exist and are sanctified by
the state.

"The 'progress' toward the bureaucratic state, adjundicating
and administering according to rationally established law and
regulation, is nowadays very closely related to the modern capitalist
development. The modern capitalist enterprise rests primarily on
calculation and presupposes a legal and administrative system . . .
[It] cannot accept . . . adjundication according to the judge's sense
of equity in a given case or according to the other irrational means
of law-finding that existed everywhere in the past" (Bureaucracy
and Political Leadership 1394-1395).

However, the bureaucratic superstructure requires a capitalist
economy as much as the capitalist economy relies on a bureaucratic
framework, as the superstructure must be guaranteed a certain amount
of taxes in order to keep impersonal, objective, and dependable
salaried officials rather than lords with independent power who can
exert an unpredictable influence on the system. "A certain
measure of a developed money economy is the normal precondition at
least for the unchanged survival, if not for the establishment, of
pure bureaucratic administrations . . . Without a money economy the
bureaucratic structure can hardly avoid undergoing substantial
internal changes, or indeed transformation into another
structure" (Bureaucracy 964). The more sophisticated this
bureaucracy becomes, the more it relies on the assurance large
quantities of money that can only exist with developed capitalism.
Thus modern capitalism and the external bureaucratic structures grow
up together, and mutually create a system that can achieve its goals
in a systematic and rational manner.

The resulting rationalized bureaucratic structure is able to
rationalize social activity to a previously unprecedented degree, as
individuals are coordinated to create a huge 'machine' in which they
function as interchangeable parts. The creation of such a system
results in a dehumanized rationality, in which individual differences
are unimportant and are overshadowed by the objective modern
bureaucracy. "Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more
it is 'dehumanized,' the more completely it succeeds in eliminating
from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal,
irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation"
(Bureaucracy 975). This requires the advent of the bureaucratic
office, in which the individual is important not for any independent
station, but for the role he or she is employed to fulfill. Thus, it
is important that the material means ultimately rest in the
bureaucratic structure, rather than in its employees. "The
bureauctatic structure goes hand in hand with the concentration of
the material means of management in the hands of the master"
(Bureaucracy 980). Like in Marx's factory, the 'raw materials' are
brought together to create a maximum efficiency; however, this occurs
not only in the capitalist enterprise but in every realm of activity,
from the political arena to the research institution. The end result
is the creation of officials who make decisions based not on personal
intuition or rational decision-making, but instead are ultimately
guided by the established rules.

"An official who receives a directive which he considers
wrong can and is supposed to object, [but] if his superior insists on
its execution, it is his duty and even his honor to carry it out as
if it corresponded to his innermost conviction, and to demonstrate in
this fashion that his sense of duty stands above his personal
preference . . . This is the ethos of office" (Bureaucracy and
Political Leadership 1404).

In the end, the bureaucrat must answer to the bureaucratic
corporate structure rather than personal conscience or rationality,
maintaining the stability of the system.

A key factor in the creation of a bureaucracy is the
specialization of knowledge. As manual labor is divided to increase
efficiency, intellectual labor must become increasingly specialized
to improve efficiency. "Limitation to specialized work, with a
renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it invokes, is
a condition of any valuable work in the modern world"
(Protestant Ethic 180). The official, specially trained to fulfill a
specific role in the bureaucratic mechanism and increasingly
dependent on the system to apply this knowledge, cannot leave this
system. "The professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity
in his entire economical and ideological existence . . . the
individual bureaucrat is, above all, forged to the common interest of
all the functionaries in the perpetuation of the apparatus"
(Bureaucracy 988). This dependence creates a system that is
incredibly difficult to destroy, as the destruction of the
bureaucracy would result in chaos and there is thus a great deal of
interest in its maintenance. "Increasingly, all order in public
and private organizations is dependent on the system of files and the
discipline of officialdom, that means, its habit of painstaking
obedience within its wonted sphere of action" (Bureaucracy 988).

The development of rationalization has many inherent problems that
are in need of checking. The central problems of this order are the
collapse of meaning and value and the stagnation of the system itself.
The process of rationalization tends to dry up potential sources of
meaning, as it eliminates mystical explanations. While the individual
might not know the specific details of how the world works, there is
an understanding that it functions in rational, scientific ways
rather than irrational ones. "Principally there are no
mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that
one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means
that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to
magical means in order to master or implore the spirits"
(Science as a Vocation 139). As pure rationality does not lend itself
to a set of values, explaining the universe solely in terms of the
rational creates a void of meaning. In addition, the process of
continual progress eliminates the idea of a meaningful death, and by
extension, the idea of a meaningful life. The individual "catches
only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit calls forth
ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not
definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence.
And because death is meaningless, civilized life is meaningless; by
its very 'progressiveness' it gives death the imprint of
meaninglessness" (Science as a Vocation 140). This sense of
meaninglessness pervades the bureaucratic system as well, as the
dominance of trained officials results in a lack of direction for the
bureaucratic corporation. "The 'directing mind,' the 'moving
spirit,' differs in substance from the civil service mentality of the
official" (Bureaucracy and Political Leadership 1403). As
rationalization progresses and the 'directing mind' is less important
to the running of an enterprise, the bureaucracy can get stuck in a
rut without the ability to change direction.

For Weber, the earlier solutions offered by Marx and Tocqueville
are not viable, as bureaucracy is not limited to the economic sphere
but pervades all institutions, including democracy and the state.
Modern democracy is not a legitimate counterweight to bureaucracy, as
modern politics is inescapably bureaucratic in nature. Far from
empowering its participants, democracy often serves to elect a
candidate who was already bureaucratically chosen. "A formally
free election may hide an appointment - in politics especially by
party bosses . . . the parties can turn a formally free election into
the mere acclamation of a candidate designated by the party chief, or
at least into a contest, conducted according to certain rules, for
the election of one of two designated candidates" (Bureaucracy
960). The bureaucratic party system is what actually controls the
democratic process; thus, democracy cannot possibly offset
bureaucratic rationalism. Marx's solution is equally implausible, as
eliminating capitalist enterprises and placing economic production in
the hands of the state would only serve to create a more oppressive
state bureaucracy. "The abolition of private capitalism would
simply mean that also the top management of the nationalized or
socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic . . . State
bureaucracy would rule alone if private capitalism were
eliminated" (Bureaucracy and Political Leadership 1402). Thus,
neither Marx nor Tocqueville can provide a solution to the dilemma of
rationalized bureaucracy.

The only way to alleviate the meaninglessness and stagnation of
rationalization is through infusions of charisma by a certain
individual. With "the authority of the extraordinary and
personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion
and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of
individual leadership" (Politics as a Vocation 79), the
charismatic alone has the independent power to redirect the system
and give individuals something to believe in. Unlike legalistic or
bureaucratic domination, charismatic domination is irrational and
based on the unique prophetic qualities of the charismatic leader.
"The leader is personally recognized as the innerly 'called'
leader of men. Men do not obey him by virtue of tradition or a
statute, but because they believe in him" (Politics as a
Vocation 79). This belief in the charismatic individual helps to fill
the void of meaning left in a completely rationalized system.
Additionally, only the charismatic has the ability to redirect the
bureaucracy once it has become stagnant. In his discussion of the
problems of the contemporary bureaucratic German state, Weber
expresses the opinion that "what was lacking was the direction
of the state by a politician - not by a political genius . . . but
simply by a politician" (Bureaucracy and Political Leadership
1405). It is therefore necessary that a leader occasionally appears
to revitalize a wayward bureaucratic apparatus. However, this
solution is only temporary and can only last within the lifetime of
the charismatic individual, as the charismatic's interventions will
eventually harden into routine.

The process of rationalization that has defined the modern world
poses significant questions and problems. Begun by a group of
religiously motivated pioneers, the process of rationalization soon
became an 'iron cage' which individuals could not escape from.
Ironically, the bureaucracy that is the manifestation of a collective
rationalization forces individuals to eschew individual rational
action. Another paradox is the fact that the movement towards
rationalization that was begun for irrational religious reasons
eventually led to the retreat of religious and other irrational
justifications. The rationalized social structure that is produced
cannot be remedied through either Tocquevillean democratic measures
or the Marxist redistribution of wealth; both 'solutions' transfer
power from one bureaucracy to another instead of doing anything to
prevent increasing bureaucratic domination. Thus, the only way to
alleviate the meaninglessness and stagnation of bureaucracy is
through the intervention of a charismatic, who provides both
direction and a sense of meaning through their leadership. However,
this situation also creates its own problems. As the process of
rationalization continues to develop, there is less opportunity for
the potential charismatic to develop leadership qualities and gain
independent power. This dilemma becomes increasingly difficult to
reconcile as time passes.